


Eight Months Later

by retsehcniwnaed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: DeanCas - Freeform, Destiel - Freeform, M/M, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 06:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/retsehcniwnaed/pseuds/retsehcniwnaed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean hasn't seen Cas in eight months, but Cas an't say the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight Months Later

"Dean."

Dean looked over at Sam, his eyes sticking in their lids from the tears he refused to cry, the emotion he refused to express. Sam lounged on the bed, though his back was rigid, and his mouth was a firm line.

"You’re crying."

"Fuck off, Sammy, I am not."

"Dude, your eyes are glassy and your face is pink. That’s as close to crying as you come. Why don’t you just—"

Dean jumped off the creaking mattress with a loud retort from the boxspring, grabbing his worn leather jacket off the back of a chair. “‘M goin’ out,” he mumbled, pulling his arms through the sleeves ad grabbing the car keys off the night stand.

"Dude, no! You’ve been drinking!"

Dean looked to where Sam was wildly gesturing, the half-empty whisky bottle he had sent spiralling to the floor in his haste to get up. Sam was standing in the space between the two beds, looking at Dean with a horrified expression.

"Dean, please,"

"I’ll be back soon, Sam,"

"But what if you’re not?"

The silence that met the question was nearly deafening, and Dean’s hand paused on the doorknob, the answer that had been aboit to fly off of his tongue died on his lips. He shook his head, opening the door. “I will be, Sammy. See you tomorrow. Get some sleep.” And he was gone.

The thing about driving is no matter where you are, what you’re doing with your life, or who’s in the passenger seat, you can almost always transport yourself into a memory, and still be able to keep your car on the road. These midnight Atlanta roads looked no different from midnight Tallahassee Interstate or midnight Austin race tracks. Roads were roads, and that empty passenger seat was a lot easier to imagine filled if he just kept his eyes.on the midnight road ahead of him, which were now blearily becoming those of Sheboygan.

The last place he saw him.

He pounded the steering wheel in frustration. It had been his fault. All his fault. He had gotten a little too drunk and in turn gotten a little too handsy with the redhead barkeep. Castiel hadn’t minded that. He was used to it, and had even tried getting Dean to quit drinking so much, but what hade made him leave was when Dean had retorted, “Who do you think you are, my boyfriend?”

Of course they’d been, quote-unquote, “boyfriends.” Dean had just been too afraid to admit it. He was too afraid to label them as something so intimate when he was so afraid of getting hurt. If he gave Cas the power to break his heart, it would make leaving him hurt a thousand times more.

Turns out he’d already given him that power, and hadn’t even known it.

Cas was gone the next morning. The boys had both woken up to an empty hotel room, but Dean had woken up to an empty bed.

That had been eight months and six states ago. They hadn’t so much as heard a feather rustle.

There were tears on his cheeks now. Hot, searing tracks of saltwater that were falling into his mouth, the taste of regret and self-pity heady enough to wash away his desperate drunkenness. He cried all the way to the intersection, and then there was nothing.

He woke up to a loud voice, screaming and sobbing too close to his face. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep the voice from waking him anymore. Maybe he could keep sleeping if the voice would just keep quiet.

Next, rough hands were shaking his shoulders, and then that’s when he felt all the pain. His chest felt like someone was sitting on it, and it was hard to breathe. When he was able to take a decent breath, his ribs felt achey and stiff. He could feel each individual cut on hos face, and he mentally checked his body for more damage—a hunter’s habit. When he was finished with that, he exhaled in relief. Nothing broken. No stitches needed. He was safe.

That’s when he realized he wasn’t alone, and his eyes snapped wide open.

"Cas!" His voice was strained, and wrecked, but he didn’t care. He sat up, but the blood that rushed to his head made him dizzy and weak, and Castiel just shushed him, forcing him onto his back in the grass. "It’s me," he told him, his voice just as broken as Dean’s was.

Dean was wide awake now, he had no intentions of closing them ever again, not if Cas was in his sights.

"What happened?"

"You wrecked your car."

Dean turned to look at his baby and groaned. The passenger side of the car was smashed and almost all of its paint was flaked. There was no other car around, only a headlight that wasn’t the Impala’s and tire tracks.

"He stopped to help, but I told him to get out or whatever state I found you in, I’d double it on him."

Dean huffed out a strained laugh. He was glad he didn’t have insurance to claim. Besides, the wreck was probably his fault anyway, and God hep him if he’d have had to take a breathalyzer.

"You came back." It wasn’t a question, and both of them knew it. Dean was suddenly aware that Castiel’s hand was pillowing the back of his head, and he relaxed against it.

"I never left, Dean."

"Yes you did. I know you did."

Castiel looked down, taking a deep breath. “I did….at first. But only for a few weeks. I came back because I couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to you and not being able to help you. I didn’t interfere at first. I let Sam stitch you up, reset dislocated joints, clean infected wounsds. I didn’t touch you until you had drank yourself into a stupor and woke up with he flu. After four months of watching you suffer, that had been my breaking point. Seeing you shiver in 75 degree heat, watching you clutch your stomach in.your sleep…I healed you. After that,.i healed all of your injuries. Sam’s too.”

Dean knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew the difference between the flu and food poisoning, but when his malady had lasted less than 24 hours, the boys couldn’t think of any other reasonable answers. Dean had had suspicions that Cas was helping, but he never voiced it aloud, because he wrote it off as wishful thinking.

"Thank you."

His gratitude was met with silence. A silence in which Cas stared down at Dean intently, and for once, it didn’t make Dean uncomfortable, because Dean was staring at Cas just the same.

"I’m sorry." Dean told him.

"I know. That’s all you’ve said in your sleep for the last almost year. I know."

More silence.

"I wanted youto be my boyfriend, Cas, I just didn’t—"

"I know."

Dean took advantage of the silence to study Castiel. He was relearning the slope of his nose, and the bow of his lip. The crinkles in his eyes, the small brown curl that flopped over his forehead. He was staring so intently, that he didn’t realize how close Castiel had gotten until he had to cross his eyes to see his chin.

Then he realized how close their mouths were.

Without even thinking aboit the consequences of his actions—as if he ever did that anyway—he raised his head, closing the distance between their faces and kissee him.

He moaned at first contact. He had forgotten how much he loved kissing Castiel. He had forgotten how he hd taught Castiel to kiss, and then how suddenly Castiel had taken to taking charge with his mouth. He had forgotten how it felt to have stubble scrape across his jaw as firm, hungry lips nipped and kissed at his neck. He keened, arching his back as Cas wrapped his arms around him, pulling him to his body as he assaulted his throat. There was a heat in his body he thought he would never feel again. A need in his gut that clenched anytime Cas touched any part of him.

"We have to go back, Dean," Cas told him, his hands holding on to Dean’s waist beneath his shirt, and his tongue tracing uninteligible symbols behind his ear. Dean whined, shaking his head, and Cas laughed. "I’m sure Sam will give us the privacy we need."

Dean’s stomach clenched with desire, “but what about…”

A loud metal-on-metal noise made him turn towards his car. His perfectly fixed, shiny, sleek car. Dean looked up at Cas, “I’m a mechanic. I could have done that.”

"I know."

Castiel kissed Dean one last, lingering time, helping him to his feet, an together, they made their way to the car.

On their way back to the motel, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Dean’s hand on Castiel’s thigh, Castiel’s hand on Dean’s arm, but eventually they ended up holding hands, and that’s the way they stayed all the way up into the next morning.


End file.
